About
Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German and Co-Chair of the PEN America Translation Committee. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Lutz Seiler, Pascal Bruckner and Christine Angot. She has been awarded translation grants from PEN USA and PEN UK, an NEA Translation Fellowship, a Max Geilinger Translation Grant for her translation of Philippe Jaccottet, the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of the novel Angel of Oblivion by the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap and most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship.
She also serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review. Her essays and reviews have appeared a number of journals and newspapers including Partisan Review, Salmagundi, The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, and Bookforum. In 2014 and 2015, Ms. Lewis curated Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English.
Featured Work
Angel of Oblivion, by Maja Haderlap
Angel of Oblivion is based on the experiences of Maja Haderlap’s family and the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria, many of whom fought as partisans against the Nazis during the Second World War. The story centers on the experiences of a young girl learning to navigate the terrain between two hostile communities and two extremely burdened languages: Slovenian, a language of heroic resistance and continued humiliation, and German, an escape from her stifling rural upbringing but also the language of the camps which her grandmother barely survived and many other family members didn’t. Engaging with themes of tolerance and integration of minority communities, the burden of history, the effects of conflicts on survivors and their children, and language’s role in shaping identity, Haderlap’s novel strikes at problems of paramount importance to our world today.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- 2017 PEN Translation Prize 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 2015 PEN UK Translates! award for Lutz Seiler’s novel Kruso. 2015 Austrian Cultural Forum NY Translation Prize 2014 Max Geilinger Translation Award for Philippe Jaccottet’s novella Obscurity. 2013 PEN UK Translates! award 2009 PEN Translation Fund Grant 2009 NEA Translation Fellowship.
